Merkel’s New Year’s Resolution: Open-door Migration

While German Chancellor Angela Merkel is surrounded by armed guards and cruises about in a bulletproof car, she has urged her countrymen to combat bloody terrorism with “openness” in her New Year’s address. It’s a message causing critics to say she’s an “off her rocker” leader who has set a “world record for cluelessness.”

In fairness, while the Expressreports that Merkel advised terrorism be defeated with “love and compassion,” she doesn’t appear to use those words in her speech (though I’m relying on translation — video below). Nonetheless, the address is yet another reiteration of her intent to continue bad policy in the face of withering criticism and waning poll numbers.

As predicted by many, the Muslim wave migration into Europe has led to terrorist attacks across the continent. As the Express wrote of the chancellor, “Her remarks come less than two weeks after a failed asylum seeker drove an articulated truck into families at a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 and seriously injuring dozens more. The shocking tragedy, which followed a spate of jihadi terror attacks earlier this year, has heaped yet more pressure on Mrs Merkel’s hated open door migration policy.”

Unrepentant, the German leader justified her position on migrants with prevarication-born platitudes. Pep-talk style, she announced to the terrorists, “You will not shape the way we choose to live our lives.” Yet they already have.

Violence always has this effect. For example, residents in high-crime areas may hide behind locked doors at night, while businesses either leave or must institute security measures. And Merkel refuted her statement in her speech, admitting security had been beefed up and that her government would, if necessary, institute new policies to deal with the terrorism threat.

Then from the “You can’t make this stuff up” file, consider the following story about a German entrepreneur’s marketing of anti-rape shorts. The Expressagain:

The trousers come with a lock for women’s intimate areas and an alarm, so would ensure the wearers were kept safe from any sex attacks.

…Women’s intimate areas will be sealed off with a “protective shield”.

The [entrepreneur’s] website says: “Get into your safe shorts, pull the ergonomically placed high-tech cords that are tear and cut-resistant until the trousers are in place.

“The the cords are fixed to a power alarm.

“Should someone try to get into the trousers of the jogger the alarm will go off at a volume of 130 decibels, which is supposed to scare off the attacker.”

By the way, the trousers are sold out. So the terrorists won’t shape the way we live, huh?

The concern over rape is no surprise, of course, given that last New Year’s Eve saw hundreds of women sexually assaulted by Muslim migrants in Cologne, Germany (where, it’s now known, untrained migrants were actually used as security guards). Yet the trousers aren’t a unique concept. In 2005, a group of Swedish high-school girls created an anti-rape belt buckle; Sweden has also had a problem with Muslim-migrant sex crime.

While boasting of her German system’s virtues, Merkel stated that it “accepts — no, it requires — dissent and criticism.” But this is a falsehood. Germany has “hate-speech” laws under which those criticizing Islam can be punished; the chancellor has also pressured Facebook to remove posts her government deems hateful, with fines and sanctions threatened for noncompliance.

As for jihadist hate, Merkel does appear to echo the Beetles’ sentiment “Love is all you need.” But life is not a movie. Love may ultimately conquer all — in the sense of how “God wins in the end” — but the beginning and middle sometimes require administered bloody noses. Moreover, not everyone responds to “love” the same way.

The mistake of projection is when we ascribe our own priorities, sense of virtue, and mindset onto others. But people (and peoples) can be very different. Just consider the findings of Danish psychologist Dr. Nicolai Sennels, who worked for years with incarcerated Muslim youth. He points out that anger is highly accepted in Muslim cultures, and the ability to intimidate “is seen as strength and [a] source of social status,” he writes. Thus, if you respond to aggression with a kid-gloves approach, as Westerners will, Muslims may interpret it as weakness — and see you as ripe for conquest.

In a similar vein, understanding the Cologne sex attacks requires they be interpreted through the lens of the perpetrators’ culture, says Professor Jörg Baberowski of Berlin’s Humboldt University. He states that the high-profile New Year’s celebration was targeted because the predominantly North African perpetrators wanted to send the West a message: “You cannot defend your women." He says the attacks “were planned in Germany to show their lack of violence against criminals was being interpreted as a weakness,” writes the Express.

No doubt. The less internal control people have, the more external control there must be, which is why the little wild man called a toddler must have his life micromanaged. Now, understand that reflecting the wild-child Muslim mentality, these migrants hail from nations where draconian punishments are the norm, with examples being decapitation, floggings, amputation of limbs, and maiming with acid. And when the rough-hewn migrants are placed in kid-gloves-treatment Europe where the external pressure is diminished, that violent energy, no longer counteracted, can explode.

Importing increasing numbers of people with relatively lacking internal control, and becoming more barbaric ourselves, has serious consequences. As I explained in 2008:

To deter bad behavior, you must ensure that the risk/reward factor militates against committing the act — that crime truly won’t pay. To accomplish this, one begins with the understanding that risk is determined by a combination of two factors:

• The actual punishment administered.

• The probability that a transgressor will be apprehended, prosecuted and convicted.

This means that as punishment becomes less severe, the apprehension rate must increase to maintain a given deterrent. And one reason we don’t thwart crime as effectively as we could is that we forget the second factor when assessing risk; we take only the punishment into consideration. This creates an economic calculus that favors the criminal.

For instance, it’s said that theft entails only a .6 percent chance of being caught and convicted; therefore, a thief has to commit an average of about 167 crimes before he will be incarcerated. Now, since the average sentence for theft is only about two months, this means a thief may serve an average of less than nine hours per robbery.

In other words, to control a violence-prone populace, the West will either have to institute draconian punishments itself — or create a total-surveillance state in which, as with a toddler, every action of every person everywhere is watched, always. Given our effete modern mentality and technological capability, which route do you think our governments will choose?

Photo: AP Images

Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment

Thank you for joining the discussion at The New American. We value our readers and encourage their participation, but in order to ensure a positive experience for our readership, we have a few guidelines for commenting on articles. If your post does not follow our policy, it will be deleted.

No profanity, racial slurs, direct threats, or threatening language.

No product advertisements.

Please post comments in English.

Please keep your comments on topic with the article. If you wish to comment on another subject, you may search for a relevant article and join or start a discussion there.

Comments that we consider abusive, spammy, off-topic, or harassing will be removed.

If our filtering system detects that you may have violated our policy, your comment will be placed in a queue for moderation. It will then be either approved or deleted. Once your comment is approved, it will then be viewable on the discussion thread.

If you need to report a comment, please flag it and it will be reviewed. Thank you again for being a valued reader of The New American.